Day 16 / Forgiveness and Children

Day 16 / Forgiveness and Children

I’ve been pondering this one for several days. My first reaction is that I wouldn’t need to forgive my son – I’m the one who needs forgiveness. I think of all the things I didn’t do right in his life. I remember them keenly. Even little things like, one night when he dropped his bottle, I reached under the bed, grabbed it, and gave it back to him. Then he instantly threw up because I’d given him last night’s bottle which had somehow fallen down there. Not that he was really hurt by taking a mouthful of the sour milk, but it stands out in my mind as me failing. And of course there are other situations that all stack up.

But the point of this exercise is to dig deeper and examine issues from all sides. I already am working on the “Forgive Lisa” aspect of things in various other days’ exercises. So I gave this one more thought. Were there really things I might need to forgive my son for, that could be impacting our relationship?

I realized, after some pondering, that it’s bothered me that he isn’t trying to get a job / move his life forward. I know the job market is tough. But to not even try, or to not move forward with schooling, doesn’t make sense to me. He could be writing novels. He could be doing all sorts of productive things.

Instead, what he does, along with helping my ex with random tasks, is to run a twitter feed where he shouts at people and swears. When I recently had an IM discussion with him about the nature of violence and pornography in video games, he began shouting at me. This all bothers me immensely. He’s 25. He’s an adult male. I make excuses and ignore it and figure “boys will be boys” – but at a core level this is not what I want to see in an adult. Male or female. One should not have to shout at another to force a point on them. Nor should one have to swear.

So I think this exercise has helped a lot, in bringing these feelings to the surface. Now I have to figure out what to do next. Clearly he’s 25 and is an adult. And I did speak up the next day and indicate that his shouting was inappropriate. But maybe it is time for me to “unfollow” his feeds, if this is the way he interacts with others, so it doesn’t upset me. I can love of him and also not approve of the way he interacts with his Twitter people.